Clickety-Clack

Having spent part of the afternoon poking around various marketing sites, I am temporarily convinced that my professional life will suffer if it remains blog-free. Hence, this post.

Andrew and I saw a fine film last night entitled “Travellers and Magicians,” which is playing through Thursday at the Oak Street Cinema in Minneapolis. Filmed in the remote Buddist kingdom of Bhutan, it is a simple road movie about Dondup, a Bhutanese government official who longs to escape the placidity of life in his beautiful but remote village. When he receives a letter from an American acquaintance offering to help him obtain a visa, he seizes the chance. Donning his American-style sneakers and hoisting a boom box over his shoulder, he sets off along the slow, winding road to the town of Thimptu, hoping to arrive in time to meet up with his American friend. Along the way, he encounters an assortment of fellow travelers who eventually affect his outlook. Most notable among them is a slyly perceptive monk who attempts to indirectly guide Dondup by means of a tale that he tells in installments along the journey.

Travellers & Magicians provides no earth-shatteringly new insights into the perpetual human dilemma over the costs and benefits of change versus constancy. But the film is comfortable with both its ambiguity about Dondup’s obsession with the West and its refusal to neatly resolve his story. It is also beautifully shot, particularly the scenes from the monk’s tale, which are rendered all the more dreamlike and magical by the unbelievably breathtaking Bhutan scenery. Indeed, I’m sure that the movie will help to fuel the Bhutan craze among wealthy, novelty-seeking travelers, as described recently in the NYT Travel section.

As an aside, this NY Times article notes that Ruth Reichl has described Bhutanese cuisine as quite possibly the worst in the world. From what I could see, nothing in the film served to suggest that Ms. Reichl might be wrong.

Ned turned four today, with the requisite amount of congratulations and fanfare. We took it easy in the gift department, but I did indulge his thirst for barbarism by giving him a small wooden catapult. Constructed of short, thick wooden dowels and rubber bands, it shoots ping pong balls 15 to 20 feet. When the mechanism releases, the wooden arm gives a satisfying “CLUNK,” but the near weightlessness of the missile means that the device can do no actual damage. Ned was thrilled, to say the least, having been heretofore denied access to all toy weaponry but for two-inch Playmobil pirate swords. Immediately after dinner, he trotted out to the living room alone and began to shoot balls lovingly across the room. Amidst the mayhem of the imagined destruction, he was overheard to say, “This is the best toy ever! I’m the luckiest boy in the whole world!”

I think one of the sweetest things about having children is witnessing their experience of pure joy, however fleeting, and no matter how unexpected its source. I wonder if it made my mother as happy to see my rapturous absorption in the Barbie townhouse I received for my 5th or 6th birthday? I remember well the wonder of sending Barbie on her maiden voyage up that pink, wrought-plastic elevator. At that moment, with my dearest wish fulfilled, I was undoubtedly the luckiest girl in the whole world.

It’s been a long time coming, but I have finally reached the point where I must acknowledge publicly (to the extent that this reader-free blog constitutes a public forum) that I have come to doubt, however mildly, the unassailable perfection of my beloved Dara Moskowitz. Dara, Dara, whose witty, fluid prose makes me silly with happiness; whose enthusiastic drooling over some spectacular carne can make me momentarily forget my decades of vegetarianism. I regularly bookmark Dara’s reviews; I email them to friends who may never visit the Twin Cities again; I read them aloud to my husband with as much proud flourish as if I’d written them myself.

But for the last couple of years I’ve harbored the gnawing suspicion that I value Dara’s writing more than her palate. The reason is simple: Every so often, her unfettered enthusiasm for some restaurant or another has prompted me to travel large distances and pay a babysitter vast sums of money just so that I can languish through a meal of disappointing mediocrity.

Most recently, I had occasion to try the cupcakes at Cupcake, the University Avenue coffee shop and bakery reviewed by Dara four or five months ago. I had been saving up the indulgence based on Dara’s description of the marvels to be had there, including things like the icing on the red velvet cupcake. (“[T]he stuff is pure and fresh, full of vanilla and clean as a dawn sunbeam.”) Dara promised me that other cupcakes would be equally sublime:

“Like the s’mores one, in which a puck of chocolate cake, as lush as pudding, as rich as Al Gore’s sense of irony, crouches beneath a marshmallow topping as thick, sweet, and sticky as Tammy Faye Baker in a bathtub full of honey. And it doesn’t end there. Oh, no. At the crown of this rich, thick, sweet, sticky whopper of a humdinger is a cute little rectangle of graham cracker, and a darling little square of chocolate bar.”

Given such an elegant endorsement, how could these cupcakes not be transcendent? Well, I finally had a chance to sample a few Cupcakes, and, uh, they were pretty good. Now a pretty good cupcake is a very nice thing, don’t get me wrong. But life altering, it was not. Resplendent with the purity of a new dawn, it was not. And worth $2.95, well, it probably was not.

And so, once again, I was left with my head hanging, hands stuck in pockets, while I scuffed the dirt with my sneaker and struggled to reconcile culinary expectations with reality. I don’t really blame Dara. She can’t help loving food so completely, or possessing such incredible powers of description, or whatever it is that makes me such a sucker for her reviews.

But actually, as I think about it, I’d probably rather be a sometime sucker than live in a world in which I cannot be Dara’s happy, faithful groupie. After all, even when it’s adopted wholesale from someone else, and even when it’s transient, exuberance is still a complete thrill.

And so let me tell you about the most fabulous cupcakes in the Twin Cities. . .

Dara’s review of Cupcake is here.

In the last few days, there have been a variety of reports in the news concerning the fact that world is about to reach its projected maximum oil production, even as world demand continues to rise. The growing oil consumption is due to both ever-more-rapid industrialization in countries like China and India, as well as Americans’ continued, baffling inability to make conservation and alternative energy a pressing national priority.

According to a report in today’s Star Tribune, the average American consumes 21 barrels of oil, while the Chinese and Indians average 1.3 barrels and less than one barrel, respectively. The article cites Amos Nur, a Stanford geophysicist, who predicts that it would require 50% more oil should Chinese and Indian consumption rise to just one-fourth or one-third the American level. Nur (like many other experts) also speculates that the rising tensions over oil access will eventually result in military conflict.

So here I sit, wringing my hands over the situation at my local Caribou Coffee shop, which I reached by driving my 18mpg guzzler of a minivan, and where I am clickety-clacking on a synthetic plastic keyboard made from petroleum while I drink coffee shipped via oil-powered vehicles of various sorts.

Meanwhile, Congress has authorized exploration in the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge, one of the last areas of pristine wilderness left in this country, with an eye toward extracting oil from a series of smaller oil deposits. The scattered distribution of the deposits would require a series of pumping stations, airstrips, housing, waste treatment facilities, and so forth throughout the range of the Porcupine caribou herd, which is already shrinking, and may suffer further decline due to disruption from drilling.

I think my next post should be from home, with a glass of water as my sole accessory.

A NYT article about drilling is here.

A couple of days ago, I found my mailbox stuffed with the two-inch-thick annual directory for the American Public Power Association, which is a nonprofit service organization for the 2,000+ community-owned electrical associations throughout the nation. Although its subject matter is far outside the realm of my everyday concerns, I wasn’t surprised by its appearance. It falls within the same category as the public notices from rural water associations and the special offers from Pheasants Forever that I regularly receive in the mail.

I don’t blink an eye when these items arrive, even though I’m a customer of Xcel Energy, a city dweller, and a vegetarian, because all of this mail shares one particular trait: It is addressed to my father, Dave Watson, who died in February 2001. A small town attorney, he represented his county’s electric cooperative and rural water association, and he was an avid hunter. Despite my phone calls and letters, a few diehard organizations have his name so deeply imbedded in their databases that they keep trying to reach him, year after year.

I am an old hand at dealing with my dad’s unfinished business. Disabled by a stroke in April 1999. his personal and business affairs were a complete mess, and it fell almost entirely to me to manage them. After the stroke, my visits invariably revolved around trying to help him deal with reams of unopened mail, stacks of unpaid bills, and the painful, painful details of closing the solo law practice that he had operated for 27 years. These efforts were vastly complicated by his intractably hard-headed stubbornness, which persisted full force until his final day of life. Indeed, this stubbornness is ultimately what killed him–he died an accidental death under circumstances that arose because he was incapable of acknowledging the limitations imposed by his disability.

But I cannot rail too much against his stubbornness, because I think it is also the attribute that saved him in the days after the stroke. He spent the first ten days or so in intensive care, essentially non-responsive. I was there when they moved him to the neurology unit, still unable to speak or even open his eyes. After he was settled into the room, the neurologist tapped his feet and flashed a light in his pupils, without much apparent response. Then the neurologist said, “Dave, can you lift a finger?” And my incorrigible father–who passionately hated hospitals, and who never missed an opportunity to make a joke–slowly and defiantly raised his middle finger. After a surprised pause, the neurologist laughed, then scribbled something on the chart and went on his way.

I believe that my dad’s defiance probably led him to a better recovery than he should have had, given his poor health. It certainly resulted in his return to independent living (despite his daughter’s best efforts to force him into an assisted care facility). Other than providing additional proof that stubbornness is both a blessing and a curse, though, I really don’t know what lesson or insight is to be gained from the outcome of my dad’s life. I still have a hard time getting past the profound loneliness of his death, and the fact that I did not have much power to abate it. I don’t even know why I’m trying to write about it, since my feelings about the entire experience remain barricaded behind a thick, impenetrable wall.

But I must be a little better, because I didn’t mind receiving the APPA directory. It used to bother me every time I’d receive mail addressed to Dad. But now that so much time has lapsed, it is no longer painful to receive these small reminders of who he was. If the mail has any useful play value, I always give it to my kids because I like them having some small connection to the grandfather they never knew. (The Public Power directory had a great spiral binding that Ned used for one of his imaginary machines.)

Along those lines, we have a stack of blue will covers that I salvaged from Dad’s office, which we use for drawing paper. Last week, we used some of them to make fish decorations for Ned’s pirate party. I told Andrew, who was in charge of the sharks, to make sure that the “Watson Law Office” address appeared on the fin. No one else noticed or cared, but my dad would have thought it was kind of funny.

The web site for the APPA can be found here.

Perhaps nothing in the world more quickly reorders one’s daily priorities than a couple of sick kids. I’ve been reminded of that lesson for the last week or so, as I’ve squirted eyedroppers of cough syrup and Tylenol into the willing mouths of my children. (“Mmm, nummy med-sin,” says Helen. “Yay, I’m sick! Medicine!” exclaims Ned.) In fact, with all the hacking that’s been going on around here, you’d think we were trying to crack computer code. I’m glad to report, however, that my kids can breathe clearly now; the rattle is gone. They are finally well enough to return to daycare, and it is most definitely a bright, bright, sunshiny day. Luckily, my small-but-dedicated cadre of readers has been very understanding about my weeklong absence from this weblog.

Speaking of Andrew, we had a delightful run-in with two salesmen at the Northeast Chamber of Commerce’s “After Hours” Expo, which we attended this week on behalf of the Eastside Food Co-op. The Expo was part of a series of Chamber events designed to promote networking between Northeast Minneapolis businesses. We both found the unapologetically self-serving nature of the affair very freeing, primarily because there was simply no basis to lambaste its shamelessly commercial focus. After all, it wasn’t exactly sponsored by the Chamber of Social Justice. In my experience, participants at these Chamber events are very friendly, and take pains to seem enthusiastic about one another’s products and services, no matter how feigned their actual interest. This week’s event was even more appealing than most because many exhibitors had big bowls of candy on their tables and, even better, there was a cash bar.

Near the end of the evening, two gentleman came up to our table and asked, practically in a single breath, about the Co-op’s advertising program and about our degree of familiarity with “Tidbits” newspaper. After determining that we knew nothing of the latter, they were quick to educate us about this free publication, which describes itself as a “non-controversial, weekly newspaper dedicated to publishing entertaining morsels for the mind, food for thought as it were: trivia, fun facts, amusing stories and oddities.”

I read through it this morning and, as far as I can tell, the paper is essentially a medium for advertising. It devotes one-third of its space to content (all produced out of its national office), while the remaining space is reserved for local advertisers. As promised, the content is entirely non-controversial, to the point of puzzling blandness. This week’s issue, for instance, featured a series of bios of “spooky actors” (Bette Davis, Bela Legosi), NASCAR family dynasties (the Earnhardts, the Pettys), and a regular column with write-in tips from readers. (H.G. in Georgia suggests collecting rainwater in buckets for watering one’s plants.)

As for the Tidbits guys, they were archetypes of small-time salesmen, from their practiced back-and-forth banter about the benefits of advertising in their paper to their mildly bouffant hairdos. It was oddly pleasing to witness their sales dance, which was founded on a brand of salesmanship as broadly-drawn and fundamentally simplistic as the content of their kooky little newspaper. An example: In response to Andrew’s question about circulation, one of them solemnly assured us that their local Anoka County “Tidbits” was the most widely read paper in Anoka, boasting an official circulation of 16,500. “And we’ve done marketing studies and whatnot,” he continued, “that show that each issue is actually read 3.5 times, because Grandma reads it and passes it to her grand kids, and Mom reads it and passes it along to Dad, and coworkers pass it to one another, and so on, until you’re looking at a circulation of 50,000 plus.” His solemn appeal to math, equally irrefutable and illogical, bespoke of faith healers, pyramid schemes and chain letters. We both found it utterly charming.

The NE Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce website is here.

For those with dreams of becoming a publishing mogul, your wait is over.

Daycare drop-offs inevitably fall into one of two categories: painless or gut-wrenching. There’s simply no middle ground, at least for us. Either my kids are happy to be left somewhere, so that I drive away flush with the exhilaration of temporary liberation, or they’re devastated at the prospect of abandonment, so that I drive away wracked with guilt, the echoes of their wails still battering my swollen heart.

Yesterday morning, it was Ned who stared at me longingly from across the chasm. From the beginning, he has struggled to find acceptance in the crew of boys at the little church daycare he attends 1.5 days per week. A host of factors work against him: he’s a bit younger than most of them; his personality is naturally a little overpowering, so that he doesn’t always fit easily into play; and, perhaps most damning of all, he has yet to show any genuine interest or talent in sports. One day when I picked him up, he calmly told me that he had tried to join a basketball game with the other boys, but they had thrown balls at him to keep him away. “And you know, Mom,” he said, with mild surprise, “some of those balls really hurt.” Maternal investigation immediately followed, and revealed that the ball-throwing was mutual, although Ned had indeed been the target of exclusion. It was a bit of a watershed for us. The daycare director said all the rights things to calm my concerns; I began receiving daily reports on whether and how Ned had played with the other kids; and another boy at the daycare developed into a regular playmate. Daycare slowly became tolerable to him, if not the Shangri-la of his preschool.

Still, it is clear that when Ned’s little friend is absent from daycare, he is the odd man out. Yesterday morning confirmed that, once again. As I hung up his coat in the hall, Ned stepped in the door of the playroom, where the crew of boys was playing an elaborate game with cars and blocks. Before he even uttered a word, he was met with a “NO, Ned! You’re not allowed!” He burst into tears and came running out into my arms.

Does any parent ever feel up to the task of providing guidance in this kind of situation? I sure as hell don’t know what I’m doing. I am so paralyzed by my own memories of childhood social isolation that it seems ludicrous, a cosmic joke, that I am now in the position of helping someone else navigate those dangerous, turbulent waters.

But I was and am and forever will be his mother, so I did my best. I hugged him tight, and let my mouth run on and on with every possible soothing thing that came into my mind. I assured him that it wasn’t his fault that the kids hadn’t welcomed him into the game, and that I was sorry that they weren’t being polite. I suggested that he try asking them about their game, and watch for a chance to join quietly. (“No, I can’t, Mom! I don’t want to!”) Praying that it would be true, I pointed out that his little friend should be arriving soon, and suggested that he find something else to do until then. Finally, I reminded him that in just a few weeks, our summer babysitter would take over and he wouldn’t be coming to this place of evil anymore. (Okay, I may not have actually said the word “evil,” but I wanted to.) Then we walked together into the room, where I explained to the aide that Ned was sad because he couldn’t find anyone to play this morning, and suggested that she shake all those little monsters in the corner until their teeth rattled. (Okay, I didn’t do that either.) For a moment, I watched from the door as he stood forlornly in the middle of the room. Then I gave into my own tears and I fled.

Forty-five minutes later, I called to check up on him and was told he was playing nicely with his pal. (“Nicely” being perhaps a bit of an overstatement, since I’m perfectly well aware that their play usually involves a fair amount of evil plotting and implied gore.) When I picked him up, he was cheerful enough, engaging in his usual wheeling and dealing for “screen time,” and chattering about random trivia.

So guess I could have been less emotional about the episode. I could have saved my hand-wringing for something bigger, and not spent long minutes in a tearful revisit of my decision to work part-time. I could have focused on the fact that this situation is probably teaching Ned something important about resilience, and about holding it together in the face of difficult situations not of his own making. I have to say, though, I’d rather that he learn that people are kind; that if you’re nice to others, they’ll be nice to you; that adults are always good at helping kids solve problems constructively. I wish he could have unshakable faith in those things, at least for awhile longer.

But it’s probably too late now. In fact, I’m sure that it is, judging from his frequent proclamation that “Girls Shall Not Be Allowed,” whether at his birthday parties, or into his clubhouse (when it’s built), or into his bedroom. He has also decided that he never wants to marry, and instead plans to live “Alone in the Wilderness,” like Dick Proenneke. So I guess the die is cast for my beloved little misanthrope. And, of course, it’s all my fault, for sticking him into that rotten daycare.

Ah, my poor neglected weblog. I didn’t realize how busy I would become when I first undertook to fill you with my grandiloquence. I forgot that I was plotting an active return to the working world, to pursue opportunities created solely through my own energy and initiative. Even more fatal, I failed to realize that gardening season would soon be upon us, so that any spare moment would be devoted to weeding and digging and sneaking into every garden center and plant sale in a five-mile radius.

On an entirely unrelated matter, I was reluctantly grateful to Andrew for clearing up a little something for me tonight. Recently I’ve been disturbed by a change on the packaging of our family’s customary loaf of bread, Brownberry 7 Grain. For the last month or so, the package has borne the cheery announcement, “Great New Look!” Yet, as far as I can tell, there has been absolutely no change in the appearance of the label or any other component of the package, other than the addition of the proclamation. It’s been slowly making me ever more furious. Every time I’ve bought a loaf lately, I’ve found myself muttering, with growing contempt, “Great new look, great new look.” “Look, Helen,” I’ll say to that sweet little parrot in my grocery cart, “doesn’t the bread package look different and new and great?” “New and great, Mama!” So wicked, to expose that innocent to my mean-spirited mockery, but I’ve been unrepentantly driven to it by the insanity and silliness of the claim.

Do the people at Brownberry seriously think that consumers will choose their product simply because of an overt claim of new and improved packaging? Could their marketing team possibly be so cynical? In a way, it’s clever—stickers are cheap, so the program probably boasts excellent cost-to-benefit ratio, even if it only works on the 3% of consumers with the most acute form of autonomic buying response syndrome. Still, it irritates me.

Unable to restrain myself any longer, I finally began to rant about it to Andrew tonight. But I only made it 45 seconds into my diatribe before he cut me off, remarking mildly, “Yeah, didn’t they change the shape of the bread?” And I realized that in recent weeks, while cutting off crusts for my kids’ sandwiches, I had noticed something different about the shape of the slices. More trapezoidal. Less crust waste. In short, a Great New Look.

An Emily Letila moment, if ever there was one.

I’m sitting across the table from a wailing child, typing impassively over the din of her fury. At first glance, it is not exactly a “mother of the year” moment, but I am unconcerned by appearances.

You see, Helen likes to drink milk directly from her cereal bowl (usually in lieu of actually consuming any of the cereal). When the milk runs out, she gives the governing adult two choices:

(1) “More milk in it! More milk from de cup!” – OR -
(2) “More milk in it! Jes from de bottle!”

Option #1 requires opening the sippy cup and recycling milk already served; Option #2 demands retrieval of the gallon jug from the fridge. The adult must listen carefully to discern the requested manner of delivery, lest ALL HELL BREAK LOOSE.

This morning, I poured milk from de cup, rather than de bottle, and life as we knew it came to a tragic, calamitous end.

Can you believe that this angelic creature is capable of such fist-pounding, eardrum-splitting rage? It’s kind of inspiring. I wish I could be so unapologetically furious.